Japan in 2000

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This article was originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year, an annual print publication that
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When Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi formally opened the 147th session of the Diet (parliament) on Jan. 28, 2000, he delivered his address to a half-empty chamber. The day before, the long-ruling Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP) had rammed through legislation that reduced by 20 the number of seats in the lower house. In protest, opposition parties boycotted Obuchi’s speech, and the Liberal Party later decided to leave the governing coalition.

Among other problems for the government were the activities of a former LDP member. In April 1999 Shintaro Ishihara, running as an independent, won the election for governor of Tokyo. In 2000 he urged several controversial actions, including altering the constitution in order to vastly expand the Japanese military and acquire nuclear arms. Moreover, facing a formidable debt problem in Tokyo, he proposed a heavy tax on banks with headquarters in the capital. Although his tax would have been legal under the constitution, national ministries moved to block the plan.

To make matters worse, Ishihara was widely quoted as doubting the occurrence of the Nanking Massacre—the mass killing and ravaging of Chinese citizens by soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army after its seizure of Nanjing (Nanking), China, in December 1937. Ishihara caused further outrage with his bizarre remark that Korean and Chinese immigrants (he used the derogatory wartime term sangokujin to describe them) were apt to cause disturbances after an earthquake. He offered an apology but added that “illegal residents” were “very troublesome.”

On April 2 Obuchi suffered a stroke that left him comatose; he died six weeks later. (SeeObituaries.) Three days after Obuchi’s stroke, the Diet approved as his successor Yoshiro Mori, secretary-general of the LDP. (SeeBiographies.) Faced with sagging public support, Mori dissolved the lower house of the Diet and called for new elections. In the elections held on June 25, the LDP managed to win only 233 of the 480 seats in the lower house—down from the 271 it had held in the previous session—and was thus forced into an awkward alliance with two smaller parties, the New Komeito and the New Conservative Party, in order to gain a legislative majority.

On a happier note, Fusae Ota became the first Japanese woman to win a gubernatorial election. On February 6 Ota, a former official in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, was elected governor of Osaka. Two months later Yoshiko Shiotani, who had the support of the LDP, became the second Japanese woman to become a governor when she won the post in the city of Kumamoto.

Japan mourned the loss of Dowager Empress Nagako, who died on June 16 at the age of 97. She was the longest-living dowager empress in Japanese history. (SeeObituaries.)

Much of the nation’s attention was focused on disasters during the year. On March 31 and April 1, Mt. Usu, a volcano on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, erupted to spew ash over a wide area. Fortunately, some 11,000 residents of nearby villages had been evacuated days before. On August 30, after some 60 days of seismic activity, Mt. Oyama on Miyake Island—only 193 km (120 mi) south of Tokyo—erupted. The eruption was accompanied by a minor earthquake that struck the island’s Ako and Tsubota districts; several jolts were felt in the capital as well. Nearly 4,000 inhabitants of Miyake Island were evacuated.

The Economy

On February 29 the LDP-led coalition chalked up one victory. Its budget for fiscal year 2000 (through March 2001) passed the lower house against stiff opposition. The budget increased spending to about $800 billion to combat the lingering recession. The budget cleared the upper house on March 17 in record time. Before that, however, the government announced that it planned to borrow about $76 billion directly from banks to meet its obligations to local governments. Normally such loans were funded by bonds, a less-expensive method. In any case, some observers predicted that the gross public debt could reach 130% of gross domestic product (GDP) by March 31, 2001.

A stubborn recession meant that the economy was in urgent need of additional priming. The Nomura Research Institute estimated that in the last quarter of 1999, Japan’s economy had contracted 1.4% since the previous quarter. The decline translated into an annualized reduction of 5.6% in GDP. Average monthly spending by households had fallen by 1.2% in 1999, down for the seventh consecutive year.

In February 2000, however, industrial production rose 3%. In March a further glimmer of hope was provided by the Economic Planning Agency chief, Taichi Sakaiya, who predicted that the economy would grow by about 2% from April 1, 2001. Masaru Hayami, governor of the Bank of Japan, was more cautious, noting that there had been no self-sustained recovery in consumer or corporate capital spending.

In July three major banks reached an agreement to consolidate their firms into one holding company. When merged in April 2001, Toyo Trust and Banking, the Sanwa Bank, and the Tokai Bank would become the third wealthiest private banking institution in the world, with about $1 trillion in assets.

Employment data continued to cause concern. Among advanced industrial nations, Japan had often been able to boast of low unemployment rates. By the end of 1999, however, unemployment had climbed to 4.7%—the highest since such data were first compiled in 1953. The rate remained at 4.7% in January 2000 (4.8% for men and 4.5% for women). Inflation was less of a problem. The consumer price index fell by a record 0.3% in 1999.

The impact of the electronic revolution was felt in various quarters. On April 3 the Bank of Japan’s quarterly business survey, Tankan, reported that big corporations had begun to invest heavily in information technology. According to the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and a Japanese research company, InfoCom, by 2001 Japan would become the world’s largest user of the Internet. On June 7 the Tokyo Stock Exchange announced plans to enable electronic transactions to be made 24 hours a day.

On August 11 the Bank of Japan raised interest rates for the first time in a decade. The rate was increased to 0.25%. The bank thus defied most government officials, who pressed to keep the rate near zero. The step revealed the independence of the central bank and its belief that the recession was ending.

Foreign Affairs

The Group of Eight (G-8) summit on July 21–23 on Okinawa dominated Japanese foreign policy during the year. On July 8 finance ministers issued reports from meetings that were a prelude to the summit. The reports noted the explosion of information technology and called for reform of the international financial system. A second set of reports emerged from meetings of foreign ministers, and they stressed the need to prevent regional conflicts in part by reforming UN peacekeeping procedures. One report emphasized the importance of reducing tensions between North and South Korea.

While taking a recess from the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David, Maryland, U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton arrived on Okinawa on July 21. He was the first president to visit the island since its reversion to Japan in 1972. He stopped first in the city of Itoman for a memorial service dedicated to the more than 200,000 Americans, Japanese, and others who died in 1945 in the Battle of Okinawa. During his stay Clinton promised “to reduce our footprint on this island.”

The climax of the summit came with the issue of a communiqué entitled “Okinawa 2000” by the heads of state. This document called for reorganization of the UN, especially the Security Council (Japan was still not a permanent member). It also proposed the establishment of a digital opportunity task force to address what the Japanese called “the digital divide” between developed and less-developed areas.

By the close of the G-8 summit, the main criticism of the Japanese was that their government had spent $750 million in hosting the conference. Moreover, many Okinawa residents were restive over the American involvement in mounting the meetings. In December 1999 Washington had offered Tokyo $1 billion for the reconstruction of the city of Nago, where much of the summit took place. American military officers hoped eventually to construct a new heliport there. A U.S. air base at Futenma (farther south) had been closed as a result of protests from Japanese living nearby. Okinawa, which makes up less than 1% of Japan’s geographic area, had 75% of the U.S. military bases in the country and hosted two-thirds of the American troops based in Japan.

In other foreign policy issues, Prime Minister Mori met with Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg on April 29. Their otherwise cordial exchange was shadowed by an incident in an area under lingering dispute. On April 21 a Russian coast guard vessel had fired on a Japanese fishing vessel near small islands between Hokkaido and the Russian-held Kuril Islands. The islets, long claimed by Japan, had been occupied by Russian forces since World War II. Tokyo continued to press for the return of what the Japanese called the Northern Territories and to make way for a formal peace treaty, delayed since 1945. During their meeting Mori briefed Putin on the upcoming Okinawa summit, which Putin later attended, and both expressed the desire to resolve the territorial claim by the end of the year. On September 5, however, while Putin was in Tokyo for additional talks with Mori, he rejected the claim of Japanese sovereignty over the islands and thus demolished hopes for signing a peace treaty in 2000.

During the year Japan and the U.S. continued their difficult negotiations on trade. In January the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that steel-plate imports from Japan were being priced below cost of production. This cleared the way for imposition of punitive dumping duties. On March 23 in Tokyo, Japanese and American negotiators suspended talks on deregulation of Japan’s telecommunications market. Washington had demanded a reduction in fees to connect to the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) system. It was pointed out that NTT, a former state monopoly, still controlled 99% of local phone traffic. After nine days of intense negotiations, on July 19 the U.S. and Japan reached an agreement to cut linking costs by about 40% over three years.

In May Mori made the obligatory trip to Washington. He offered President Clinton opinions on information technology; the president, in turn, repeated his demand for deregulation in communications. In July Japan sent six ships to the northwestern Pacific on whale-hunting expeditions. Their targets were minke, Bryde’s, and sperm whales. The Japanese argued that international conventions allowed such hunts, provided that the mission was to conduct scientific research. Critics pointed out that once the Japanese catches were examined, the whale meat was resold in Japan at high prices to distributors and expensive restaurants. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated that the U.S. was “deeply troubled” by the expansion of whaling. On September 13 President Clinton announced that Japanese fishermen might be expelled from American waters and additional sanctions could be imposed in coming months.

Japan’s relations with China were shaped by American policy. Like Washington, Tokyo had formal relations with Beijing and agreed that there was but one China. The Japanese insisted that a solution to the status of Taiwan had to be peaceful. To the consternation of Chinese officials, Japan agreed with the U.S. on joint guidelines to defend undefined “areas surrounding Japan.” The Chinese believed those areas included Taiwan.

Japanese retained commercial interests in Taiwan. Indeed, lively trade made its way through the island and Hong Kong to China. Big corporations were fascinated by the size of the potential market on the mainland. On May 29 Japan’s largest carmaker, the Toyota Motor Corp., announced that the Chinese government had authorized the formation of a joint venture with China’s Tianjin Automobile Xiali Corp. Toyota planned to open a plant in Tianjin by 2002. Total investment in the company would be about $100 million. Toyota was the third Japanese auto company to link with Chinese firms, following the Suzuki Motor Corp. and the Honda Motor Co. Tianjin Xiali was already producing a compact car, known as the Charade, in Japan.

An equally difficult situation marked Japan’s ties with the Korean peninsula. Tokyo had established formal ties with Seoul. Only informal contact was sporadically maintained with Pyongyang. On April 5, after eight years of silence, talks regarding the possible normalization of Japan’s relations with North Korea opened in Pyongyang, albeit on shaky ground. North Korean negotiators insisted that Japan first apologize for the occupation of the peninsula from 1910 to 1945 and, further, discuss compensation for the occupation. Japan’s chief representative repeated Japan’s 1995 apology to its neighbours for wartime aggression but refused to offer compensation, then went on to counter by citing other issues: the North’s missile buildup and suspected nuclear weapons program as well as its reported abduction of Japanese nationals. The two sides suspended negotiations. After the slight thaw in contacts between Seoul and Pyongyang, talks in Tokyo in late August between Japan and North Korea resulted once again in the entrenchment of positions and another suspension of negotiations.

During the year Japan took the lead in expanding an unusual regional bloc. On April 22 delegates from 16 countries and territories in the South Pacific gathered in Miyazaki. The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) represented an array of islands ranging from Palau and Micronesia to Samoa and Kiribati and included such nations as Australia and New Zealand. PIF chairman Kuniwo Nakamura of Palau and Prime Minister Mori welcomed the group, which urged the responsible management of natural resources and attention to environmental problems in the South Pacific.